DocumentCode :
2288176
Title :
Cost-efficient hosting and load balancing of Massively Multiplayer Online Games
Author :
Nae, Vlad ; Prodan, Radu ; Fahringer, Thomas
Author_Institution :
Inst. of Comput. Sci., Univ. of Innsbruck, Innsbruck, Austria
fYear :
2010
fDate :
25-28 Oct. 2010
Firstpage :
9
Lastpage :
16
Abstract :
Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOG) are a class of computationally-intensive client-server applications with severe real-time Quality of Service (QoS) requirements, such as the number of updates per second each client needs to receive from the servers for a fluent and realistic experience. To guarantee the QoS requirements, game providers over-provision to game sessions a large amount of their resources, which is very inefficient and prohibits any but the largest providers from joining the market. In this paper, we present a new approach for cost-efficient hosting of MMOG sessions on Cloud resources, provisioned on-demand in the correct amount based on the current number of connected players. Simulation results on real MMOG traces demonstrate that compute Clouds can reduce the hosting costs by a factor between two and five. The resource allocation is driven by a load balancing algorithm that appropriately distributes the load such that the QoS requirements are fulfilled at all times. Experimental results on a fast-paced game demonstrator executed on resources owned by a specialised hosting company demonstrate that our algorithm is able to adjust the number of game servers and load distribution to the highly dynamic client load, while maintaining the QoS in 99.34% of the monitored events.
Keywords :
client-server systems; cloud computing; computer games; resource allocation; QoS requirements; cloud resources; computationally-intensive client-server applications; cost-efficient hosting; load balancing; massively multiplayer online games; resource allocation; Dynamic scheduling; Games; Load management; Monitoring; Quality of service; Resource management; Servers; MMOG hosting; cloud computing; load balancing cost model;
fLanguage :
English
Publisher :
ieee
Conference_Titel :
Grid Computing (GRID), 2010 11th IEEE/ACM International Conference on
Conference_Location :
Brussels
Print_ISBN :
978-1-4244-9347-0
Type :
conf
DOI :
10.1109/GRID.2010.5697956
Filename :
5697956
Link To Document :
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